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The Rediff Business Special/Veeresh Malik

Auto sector frets and fumes over talk of ban on diesel vehicles

But one fact is being overlooked: the possible corrective role of alternate fuels.

Vehicular pollution is caused mainly due to four reasons: bad engine technology, adulterated or low-quality fuel, poor or lack of traffic management and poor or lack of vehicle maintenance.

The quality (or the lack of it) of fuel available in India is a little discussed subject. Which also perhaps explains the government's emphasis on things like catalytic converters rather than the basic problem of bad fuel.

The ministry of petroleum and natural gas, located at Shastri Bhawan in New Delhi, is the sole authority on fuel in India. The various public sector oil and gas companies, the Oil Coordination Committee, the research institutions… every aspect of fuel in India is controlled by this ministry.

For years now, the ministry has maintained a sphinx-like silence on the subject of fuel quality.

Information gathered from engineering colleges, large consumers and armed forces laboratories points to the fact that extra low sulphur high-speed diesel should have sulphur content as low as 0.25 per cent. But, in India, sulphur content actually goes up to as high as three per cent sometimes.

Unleaded petrol should have a nominal lead content of 0.013 grams per litre. Findings have shown that this is actually as high as 0.7 to one gram per litre sometimes. There are no figures available on aromatics, toulenes, xylenes, benzenes.

Market sources say fuel gets adulterated at all points of the supply chain, often even during import. There are allegations that India sometimes ends up buying low-speciality fuel which no other country would touch, from older refineries.

Experts suggest that one of the solutions could be use of abundantly available alternate gas-based fuels like liquid petroleum gas, compressed natural gas or propane.

They add that the problem, however, is not one of technology but of the will to act. Established liquid fuel lobbies will, simply, prevent gas from coming in as a viable alternative, even at the cost of flaring it away uselessly at the well-head. Since both gas and liquid fuels come under the same ministry, these lobbies ensure that liquid fuels prosper.

Gas-based fuels are not just cheaper in the Indian context, but they are also cleaner. Difficult to adulterate or re-sell. The government's own figures, based on comparatives of diesel-engined powered buses running on diesel as well as CNG show that, compared to diesel, there is an overall reduction in pollutants emitted by over 70 per cent.

Take a look at the following figures: while compressed natural emits 0.04 grams (per km) of particulate matter, high speed diesel emits 0.44 grams, or 90 per cent more. The figure for carbon monoxide are 0.68 and 2.40 (71 per cent more), nitric oxide 6.26 and 22.5 (72 per cent more), non-methane hydrocarbons 1 and 1.5 (33 per cent more).

So why doesn't the gas-surplus India have more gas-operated vehicles? The problem is one of inter-ministerial coordination. The ministry of surface department refuses to register gas-operated vehicles. The ministry of industries and the ministry of environment and forests are at loggerheads over the green policy. The ministry of petroleum and natural gases, it is alleged, is in favour of liquid fuels.

After decades of talk about alternate fuels, the very first meeting to try and constitute an inter-ministerial committee for coordinating introduction of alternative fuels for motor vehicles in India was held on November 2. It is still "examining" whether the type/quality of fuel used in automobiles really causes pollution!

The committee, sources say, is still not convinced that cheaper Indian gas is better than costlier imported liquid fuel.

The introduction of unleaded petrol and the catalytic converter regime, has also come in for criticism. Only the very new four-wheelers have built-in catalytic converters. (The lowdown on them is that they fail after about 10,000 kilometres or one monsoon.)

The rest, the two-wheelers on 2-stroke engines and the older vehicles, happily source and mix additives which have lead in them for the added lubricity. Worse, open lead smelters and easily available lead-additives sold as "octane boosters" ensure that lead levels in the atmosphere go up.

There is also a suggestion that the government, instead of mulling a ban, would do well to make it mandatory for diesel vehicles to use soot traps that are simple and inexpensive devices. Costing about Rs 5-10, a trap can 'trap' particulate matter and give signals when it gets choked. Indigenous catalytic converters cost Rs 1,100 and imported ones Rs 11,000.

Automobile industry people say vehicles are not the only things that pollute atmosphere. They say municipal workers who burn garbage, plastic, etc, indiscriminately on the wayside and the ubiquitous power generators in the shopping areas are also to blame. The latter run on any fuel, usually crude mixtures of diesel and cheap kerosene.

So the least the government can do for the struggling industry is steer clear of a ban on diesel vehicles, they say.

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